Yup, it's true, ants do laze around while their nest mates work

SOME ants are workers in name only. We think of social insects as hard workers, but many have individuals that laze about.

“It’s just the sort of a thing that anyone who’s ever worked on social insects has noticed&colon; ‘Oh look, half of them are standing around doing nothing’,” says Daniel Charbonneau at the University of Arizona. But no one knew if the ants were consistently inactive or merely taking a break.

Advertisement

His team studied 250 workers from five colonies of Temnothorax rugatulus and found almost half did no job (Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, doi.org/5×9).

Are they just freeloaders? Charbonneau hopes to find out. They could be backup workers or militia, live feed stations or information hubs, or perhaps simply the very young or old. “These hypotheses aren’t exclusive, so many things could be happening [at once],” he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Lazy ants are career nonworkers”